


not a circle, a cycle

by AraV (Zayrastriel)



Category: Ramayana - Valmiki
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Dystopia, F/M, Gen, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:02:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6901432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zayrastriel/pseuds/AraV
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rama is Rama, and Sita is Sita. Wherever and whenever they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not a circle, a cycle

No one can quite remember when the first bomb fell.  But the land remembers. The land always remembers, particularly when it is scarred with a million years of suffering (packed in a five metre shell, paid in advance.)

No one can quite remember who to blame for the first bomb falling.  But their DNA does; and as it twists and mutates in ravaged wastelands and crumbling cities, blame falls by the wayside. There is no place for blame when a living baby is a miracle. When a child with three limbs is a blessing from the gods.

Of course, the gods rarely speak now. Perhaps the radiation killed them along with the planet. It is more likely that they have forsaken humanity; that the grand experiment of consciousness has failed them.

_It rained acid yesterday. Do the gods weep tears of pain or anger? We’ll ask, and they’ll not answer._

No, there are no celestial deities to play hero. Heroes are rarer than gods, because no one can quite remember if heroes are real. Perhaps they’re figments of collective unmitigated despair. Or perhaps they’re broken down, by a thankless world.

Two years after the last warrior queen of an era pulls her husband’s broken body from a burning aircraft, she and her two sister-wives bear sons.  They’re the first recipients of a last-ditch attempt to purge generations of malaise from, if not their bodies, then at least those of their children. 

It tastes like porridge.

Warrior queens, of course, cannot have the fortune to bear heroes. Warrior queens _are_ heroes, but they are forgotten quickly.

This warrior queen does not bear a hero. Her elder sister does instead.

The baby has two legs.

The baby has two arms.

So long and large a child that only three bolts of electricity and an inefficient blood transfusion save the mother, her vagina torn and exposed to the infection that lives in the air like oxygen.

But there is a baby. They name him _Rama_.  It’s an ancient name, with a forgotten meaning; that language is long-dead. grace.  Hope.

* * *

When Rama is just starting to play toy swords (no toy guns, not now) with his brothers (four heads and eight limbs between them), his father hears word of a cousin reigning in a neighbouring city.  Where Rama’s inheritance is a dry dusty land pockmarked by acid, his uncle rules over poison ivy and glowing roses that exude toxicity in sweet perfume.

While ploughing ritual salt into those grounds, the king of poisoned gardens finds a child swaddled in thorns.

A tiny girl, skin dark and healthy even as the queen’s gloved hands are scraped and scratched in her desperate reach.  Lungs clear, eyes bright and brown. She smiles and giggles, and the queen laughs with her. The scraping rasp of the woman’s joy does not drive the baby to tears.

They name her _Sita_.  The word means _furrow_ , this king’s wife tells him, though she does not understand how she knows this. 

 _Sita_.

It means something else, too.  But now, more than ever, it’s difficult to remember.


End file.
